Tag Archives: Media Propaganda

It’s the Christmas period and no doubt you’ve consumed just a few of Hollywoods finest flicks on TV while chowing down on your (halal) turkey yesterday.

So while you tuck in to some delicious left over turkey sandwiches today, I thought I’d give you a different look at what Hollywood could offer.

The clip above is the alternative ending from the 2004 film “Man on Fire” starring Denzel Washington. It’s one of my favourite films, revenge, redemption, pathos, flawed but a redeemable lead character, it has it all.

The film was directed by the late Tony Scott, and the above alternate ending is voice overed by Scott himself.

After watching the alternate ending on the DVD, I felt it was much better than the ending they actually put out, but of course, our protagonist winning by suicide bombing is never going to be allowed to air in cinema.

As the debate rages today over “Zero Dark Thirty” and it’s use of the cinematic portrayal of torture (we all know the CIA & Mi5/6 do it) in capturing Bin Laden and any bad guy or “ticking bomb scenario” that allows them to use torture, it becomes very interesting what Hollywood can frame as being a cultural norm and a taboo.

Here’s some suggested reading from my earlier posts on how Hollywood is so good at propaganda:

It was all over the papers – Katya Koren – a beautiful Muslim Ukrainian model – was stoned to death for participating in a beauty contest & “violating the laws of Sharia,” only thing is, it was all a pack of lies.

The Daily Fail, ever hungry to criticise Muslims on any given opportunity, decided to run the story that “A teenage Muslim girl was stoned to death under ‘Sharia law’ after taking part in a beauty contest in Ukraine.”

All the stereotype subtexts were there – Sharia law taking over – Muslim women should be killed for showing flesh etc all leading to the middle england Daily Mail reader fearing that some kind of nut case Islamic hordes are about to takeover their green and pleasant lands and invoke archaic rules over them all.

The Daily Mail, never wanting to let the facts get in the way of a good story, made the whole story up, they point blank lied.

“A student did it, killing his classmate. There is no other underlying reason, neither religious nor linked with inter-ethnic conflicts”

This blatant propaganda against Islam by sections of the rabid (zionist owned) right wing press is disgusting. The constant spread of Islamophobic stories has to be monitored, reported and the “newspapers” (I use that term very loosely) have to be made accountable for the shit they are peddling as news.

The Government keep banging on with their prevent strategy, how about preventing the media from telling lies about Muslims?

or does that fly against freedom of speech and make me un-British?

We have to take a collective stand & demand that such practices by the media are stopped, otherwise people believe the hype about Muslims and it strengthens the racist right wing to fight us.

CNN correspondent Nic Robertson blasted Murdoch’s Fox News, after Fox lied that Robertson and other journalists were being used by the Libyan Ministry of Information as human shields, in a successful bid to block a coming, second attack on a compound in Tripoli, supposedly controlled by Qaddafi.

“[T]his allegation is outrageous and it’s absolutely hypocritical. When you come to somewhere like Libya, you expect lies and deceit from a dictatorship here,” Robertson told Wolf Blitzer. “You don’t expect it from the other journalists.”

Fox claims their own correspondent, Steve Harrigan, declined to accept the invitation from the Libyans for fear of being used as a propaganda tool, and perhaps a human shield. But Robertson claims Fox did indeed send an employee on the trip — not a regular news guy — and that Harrigan has been asleep on the job since hostilities began.

“I see him more times at breakfast than out on trips with government officials here,” Robertson said. “So for them to say and call this — to say they didn’t go and for them to call this and say this was government propaganda to hold us there as human shields when they didn’t even leave the hotel … is ridiculous.”

Fox is staking out high-ground here, claiming they were above being used by the government. Nonsense, says Robertson. “They sent a member of their team. He was not editorial. He was nontechnical, not normally a cameraman.”

Robertson added that the reason he and many other reporters agree to this and similar outings is simple. “[W]e go on these government trips … for a very simple reason because we don’t want government officials to film it themselves, edit it themselves and hand it off to us,” Robertson said, raising the suggestion that Harrigan’s reporting from Libya is suspect or incomplete.

We shouldn’t have to risk our lives to tell the truth, but we do have to be brave enough to defy those who wish to seek out collusion in their latest bloody adventure in someone else’s country.

That means always challenging the official story, however patriotic that story may appear and however seductive and insidious it is, for propaganda relies on us in the media to aim its deceptions not on a far away enemy but at you at home.

It’s very simple, in this age of endless imperial wars, the lives of countless men, women and children depend on the truth, or their blood is on us.

In other words, those whose job it is to keep the record straight ought to be the voice of people, not power.

Not only has the Wikileaks saga exposed the duplicity of some governments and the power-brokers, the reaction to Wikileaks has been just as telling.

What is the point of a free press that is servile to powerful elites?

Instead of doing their jobs and asking the tough questions the Western media allowed the Iraq war to happen and even embedded themselves with the invading armies. This played right into the hands of the pentagon. Those very same media outlets look down their noses at the foreign press and mock their lack of freedom. The build up to the war on Iraq is now being repeated, again by the very same media organisations, but this time the ‘enemy’ is Iran.

Many ‘journalists’ have taken it upon themselves to criticise Julian Assange, the Wikileaks front man, as a traitor, or someone who isn’t really campaigning for free speech. They mock him and try and assassinate his character, instead of discussing the leaks and calling for the prosecution of politicians that are calling for Mr Assange’s kidnap or murder.

John Pilger’s new documentary “The War You Don’t See” questions the role of the media in war and asks whether mainstream news has become an integral part of war-making. The film investigates the government’s lies over Iraq’s non existent weapons of mass destruction as a pre-cursor of manufacturing consent to launch an illegal invasion.

The new film is a powerful and timely investigation into the media’s role in war, tracing the history of ‘embedded’ and independent reporting from the carnage of World War One to the destruction of Hiroshima, and from the invasion of Vietnam to the current war in Afghanistan and disaster in Iraq. As weapons and propaganda become even more sophisticated, the nature of war is developing into an ‘electronic battlefield’ in which journalists play a key role, and civilians are the victims.

While all of the media fell over themselves to report the Iraqi Wikileaks, few media outlets are going back to their own coverage and acknowledging how they had failed at the time to report many of the atrocities we now know the US military knew about, and covered up.

One glaring example: the slaughter of thousands that took place in Fallujah, where all media correspondents were banned, so no one could report on what the Americans were doing.

The footage captured by Independent News correspondent Kevin Sites reflects on the controversial “Fallujah mosque shooting” video he captured in November of 2004, footage which was available on the internet and even on Kevin Sites own web page, but was ignored by the mass media.

Reports such as the one I’ve included below were common place to those who do not trust the mass media who tow the government and corporate line, most Muslims and people of good conscience were screaming out about the war crimes that were being committed, only to be told we were extremists, but when a liberal white face such as Julian Assange says it he’s lauded like he’s the second coming.

Shame on you.

The blood of over a million dead Iraqi’s is on your hands.

FALLUJA, IRAQ | NOVEMBER 13, 2004

SUNBEAMS

The carpet of the mosque is stained with blood and covered with fragments of concrete. Tank shells and machine-gun rounds have pitted the inside walls. The rotting, sweet smell of death hangs in the morning air. Gunsmoke-laced sunbeams illuminate the bodies of four Iraqi insurgents. A fifth lies next to a column, his entire body covered by a blanket.

I shudder. Something very wrong has happened here.

Yesterday I had seen these same five men being treated by American medics for superficial wounds received during an afternoon firefight. Ten other insurgents had been killed, their bodies still scattered around the main hall in the black bags into which the Marines had placed them.

The commander of the 3.1 Marines, Lieutenant Colonel Willy Buhl, told me that these five wounded, captured enemy combatants would be transported to the rear. But now I can see that one of them appears dead and the three others are slowly bleeding to death from gunshots fired by one lance corporal, I will learn later, who used both his M-16 and his 9 mm pistol on them, just minutes before I arrived.

With my camera rolling, I walk toward the old man in the red kaffiyeh and kneel beside him. Because he was so old, maybe in his early sixties, and wearing the red headgear, he had stood out the most to me when I was videotaping the day before, after the battle.

Now the old man is struggling to breathe. Oxygenated blood bubbles from his nose. Another man, stocky and dressed in a long gray shirt called a dishdasha, is slumped in the old man’s lap. While I’m taping, the old man is bleeding to death in front of my camera. I look up to see the lance corporal who had just shot all of them moments before, now walking up to the other two insurgents against the wall, twenty feet away. One is facedown, apparently already dead. The other, dressed in an Iraqi Police uniform, is faceup but motionless, aside from his breathing.

The lance corporal says, “Hey, this one’s still breathing.” Another agrees, “Yeah, he’s breathing.” There is tension in the room, but I continue to roll on the man in the red kaffiyeh.

“He’s fucking faking he’s dead,” the lance corporal says, now standing right in front of the man.

On Saturday morning, the breaking news of the day was that Linda Norgrove, had been murdered by “Talibans” during a rescue attempt. The media unquestionably swallowed the story. The Akh has to ask the question, can we rely on fair and accurate reporting from the military?

It’s a well used cliché that the first casualty of war is the truth.

Seeing that most journo’s are lazy, stuck behind the computer types, who don’t want to get out onto their own streets, nevermind out in Afghanistan, rely solely on Press Releases from sources, which are biased at best and based on corporate views at worst…fair and accurate reporting….yeah right?

In these days, one has to turn to sources that he can trust, from the very first moment this story broke, it didn’t sound right – just like you hear about american helicopters that crash due to “technical faults” in the battle zone – the script sounded too perfunctory, the version of events far too polished.

British aid worker Linda Norgrove may have been accidentally killed by US forces during a rescue mission in Afghanistan, David Cameron has said.

Linda Norgrove died during a ‘rescue’ mission carried out by US special forces. She worked for US agency Development Alternatives Inc (DAI), which in turn was contracted to the American government’s development agency USAID.

We then find out that a string of kidnaps in the same province earlier this year had ended peacefully through the negotiations of local elders and the chief of police in Kumar province, Khalilullah Zaiyi, was confident a delegation of local leaders could secure Miss Norgrove’s release.

Local Afghan leaders wanted to negotiate with Miss Norgrove’s kidnappers to win her freedom but were overruled by Nato commanders.

It was reported that there was pervasive levels of fraud within the office where Norgrove worked. Reportedly, “Taliban types” were receiving money from the DAI office.

Now this is pure speculation of course, but does this seem like a rescue mission or an assassination mission?

Or is it just another yankee blunder in a long line of yankee blunders?

What’s guaranteed is that G.I. Joe will be getting pumped up at one of the many forward operating bases in Afghanistan, with the instruction of getting out there on HK mission to get the Talibans.
More innocent people being butchered?

"Truth stands out clear from Error: whoever rejects evil & believes in Allah has grasped the most trustworthy hand-hold that never breaks. And Allah hears & knows all things."
(The Qur'an, Al-Baqara, 2: 256)

“Political authority & religion are kin brothers, neither would stand but by its companion; because religion is the foundation of political power & its pillar, & political power is the guardian of religion; political power is not established with a foundation & religion cannot be implemented without authority.”
- Shaykh Muhammad al-Yaqoubi

"War is not merely a political act, but also a political instrument, a continuation of political relations, a carrying out of the same by other means" - Clausewitz

"O mankind! We created you from a single (pair) of a male and a female, and made you into nations and tribes that ye may know each other (not that ye may despise each other). Verily the most honoured of you in the sight of Allah is (he who is) the most righteous of you. And Allah has full knowledge and is well acquainted (with all things)."
(The Qur'an, Al Hujurat, 49: 13)